do it for the vine

9,000 Seconds with Lele Pons, Summerella, and a Few More Stars of Vine

On Saturday afternoon, Summer Boissiere, a comedienne from Atlanta, was crossing the street in front of the steps at Lincoln Center when she drew a rush of teens and tweens through the weekend traffic of Broadway. The kids were eager to embrace the 19-year-old with perfect prom-ready hair, who, working under the stage name Summerella, has amassed 1 million followers on the A.D.D.-enabled video-sharing service Vine. True to the sorts of attention spans attracted to the app’s six-second time limit, the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had formed. (It would have been fair to characterize the general sentiment of some in the flock as: “I have no idea who that is.”)

Such was the movable pandemonium at the second annual New York Vine meetup—an event loosely organized by some of the video platform’s biggest stars, and their attendant handlers: a group of friends, agents, managers, and hangers-on who have cropped up to try to do whatever they can to monetize this latest brand of micro-fame in the less than three years since Vine launched. The New York Vine meetup was a freer and looser and wilder alternative to bigger admission-based gatherings like those put on by Digitour, which has sent stars of Vine and YouTube and other social-media platforms out on packaged tours that would look familiar to bobby-soxers and Beliebers alike.

The Saturday meetup was, instead, pure disarray—and not unlike the sometimes less-than-navigable experience of opening up the Vine app itself. Here they were, the stars of Vine, who as a group tend to be sunny in disposition and geographic location (California! Florida! And, O.K., Ontario, too!), on a 25-degree afternoon in Manhattan as winter was just beginning to thaw. The shiny faces of mobile-first–era celebrities on hand had about 40 million followers put together, and here was a rare, in-real-life chance to watch both sides of this new fame economy figure out their place in it.

Most of the 200 or so kids who showed up were native New Yorkers dressed in heavy down jackets and hats bearing logos from streetwear brands. The majority was not white. Nearly all who attended seemed very excited to be standing on the wide steps of one of our country’s more hallowed cultural institutions to meet their favorite famous peers. The event had originally been scheduled to take place downtown in tiny Foley Square, but then was moved uptown to Central Park. According to some of the Viners on hand, the Parks Department asked them move it again because of crowd concerns. The steps of Lincoln Center, where their only competition would be the foot traffic from a matinee of Carmen, it was.

At one point, on the north side of the steps, a no-name Viner screamed at the top of his lungs, “Oh my God, it’s me!” Everyone cheered for him with thunderous applause. The shrieking immediately brought out some members of the N.Y.P.D., who struggled to understand what was going on and told some kids to calm down, but left without incident.

The general air of disorganization was bothering Mathew Micheli and Joseph Gagliese, co-founders of talent agency Viral Nation, which represented about half of the stars on hand. Founded, originally, to rep hockey players, Viral Nation now acts as a go-between for digital celebrities and the brands who look at their follows with dollar signs in their big brand eyes. The pair describes their shop as “C.A.A. for Viners,” but were quick to emphasize how relatable and normal their talent pool is. “They’re different from other celebrities, they can do stuff like this,” Gagliese said.

He had a point. Ray Ligaya, a baby-faced 21-year-old Canadian who traffics in content so PG that Gagliese described him as “pure Disney,” was quick to jump in the arms of his fans and snap selfies with a Mickey Mouse Club-ready smile. At one point he grabbed a fan’s dad by the shoulders, looked into his eyes and said, “You’re amazing.” Gagliese said that Ligaya is one of their biggest clients thanks to that clean-cut demeanor. Some of Viral Nation’s clients, Gagliese said, can make up to $25,000 for a single sponsored post. Most take in an average of $3,000 to $9,000 a month from their work. Elsewhere in the plaza, Esa Fungtastic, a comedian whose Vines mostly play off stereotypes of his Asian heritage, was hawking a ringtone he had released on iTunes earlier in the week. He gave everyone in sight giant hugs and shook hands like a politician.

If the likes of Ligaya and Fungtastic were the showmen embracing their audience, Matthew Paquette and Danny Gonzalez seemed to be a bit shy. The two lanky-ish white boys have similar Vine styles—comedy based in using outlandish visual effects for simple jokes and wonder. Gonzalez screeches like a bird and flies through the air in a recent hit post, looped almost 13 million times and counting. This was Gonzalez’s first meetup, and Paquette’s second. Although they were always willing to pose for a picture and give a quick hug, they were less comfortable with all of the attention. Gonzalez stretched his phone above the crowd to snap a few pictures and then took a selfie with the growing mass of teens.

“I want to prove to my dad how many people are here,” he said. “He was joking with me that no one was going to show up.”

Jessica Moffe drove her 13- and 14-year-old daughters the four hours down from Elmira, New York, to meet some of their favorite Vine stars. Moffe couldn’t tell the difference between the famous and the pedestrian teens but was really trying to make sure that her daughters left with as many star-studded selfies as they could glean in the disorder.

“It’s crazy here, I just feel bad for the kids,” she said of the besieged talent.

As if on cue, the screams approached vintage T.R.L.-level volume for the first time in the day. Lele Pons, a golden-haired Florida teen who has a physical comedic skill and likability reminiscent of Carol Burnett, exited the Lincoln Square Hotel, toward the plaza. She was the Viner in attendance with the biggest following and one of the biggest on the whole network, with 7 million loyal subscribers. She was being carried, practically dragged through the throngs, by a friend with a topknot of pink dreadlocks. The look on Pons’s face was not unlike Britney Spears in the head-shaving days—a mix of fear and awe, the sort that makes good parents wince. For the rest of the day, Pons had a swirling pack of 50 or 60 fans trying to get close enough to the center of the mob to grab a quick picture or autograph from her. After accepting her fate, she didn’t anger once, even as people were pulling on her hair and shouting things into her ear.

A young girl in a fuzzy pink coat who managed to get a selfie with Pons walked away exhausted and took a seat next to a friend on the edge of the fountain in the center of the plaza.

“I got it, but that was too crazy,” she said. “There should really be a line to wait on or something.”